Category Archives: government contracting

GAO: Cyber Command is overspending on data tools

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One of the major initiatives that U.S. Cyber Command has been working on for two years is going to cost five times more than what military officials originally estimated, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The program, a software platform called Unified Platform (UP), is meant to help forces and military services working with Cyber Command to reduce the amount of data silos, and to streamline data processing, storage, queries, and information-sharing to enhance overall mission effectiveness. One of the main contributing factors to the miscalculation is that the overall cost of UP was not based on any independent analysis, GAO found. “UP did not have several key elements of its business case approved at the time of program initiation, such as approved requirements, a cost estimate informed by independent analysis, or a formal schedule risk assessment,” the GAO said. “Our prior work has shown that this type of […]

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AT&T lands NSA contract worth billions to outsource IT

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The bid protest has ended and AT&T has officially been awarded an IT contract with the National Security Agency. This is the second of three contracts that the agency will be awarding as part of its classified Groundbreaker program. The tech giant won the contract back in Oct. 2017 but DXC Technology — who was one of the bidders — protested it, halting progress. Last week, the Government Accountability Office denied the protest. In the late 1990s, the agency was faced with a telecommunication and technological revolution that they didn’t have the skills to keep up with. In 2001, the NSA launched the Groundbreaker program, outsourcing all of its internal communication systems. That same year, the agency awarded its first contract to the Eagle Alliance, known now as CSRA, a group of high class contractors, providing the NSA with cybersecurity services. The contract was renewed in Sept. 2017 under CSRA. Approximately […]

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DHS cyber tool finds huge amount of ‘shadow IT’ in U.S. agencies

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New cybersecurity tools being deployed across the U.S. government found huge numbers of uncatalogued and unmanaged computer devices connected to federal networks — a phenomenon known as “shadow IT” — that necessitated urgent modifications to many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts. Some departments and agencies had “several hundred percent” more devices on their networks than they expected and the average across government was about 44 percent more, Department of Homeland Security official Kevin Cox said last week at the McAfee Security Through Innovation Summit, hosted by CyberScoop. “There was something of a ‘oh shit’ moment,” said a person familiar with the discovery, made during the recent rollout of phase one of Continuous Diagnostics and Monitoring tools. CDM is a DHS-funded, government-wide acquisition program that buys and installs cybersecurity tools on U.S. departmental and agency networks. The tools found every kind of device imaginable on federal networks, this person said, from […]

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Pentagon hackers-for-hire take just 4 hours to find critical vulnerability in sensitive system

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This article first appeared on FedScoop. The Pentagon’s cybersecurity swat team has hosted highly-publicized challenges to find flaws in department and military branch websites, but it also recently orchestrated a more secret, complex project. The Defense Digital Service wanted to hire outside researchers to root out vulnerabilities in systems carrying sensitive department data — but without worrying about compromising the […]

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